The following piece traces its origins to November 2018, when I was selected to serve as a juror in a three-week-long trial at the Daley Center in downtown Chicago. Written in bursts and revised intermittently afterward, it was not completed until December of the following year and was not finalized until July 2020. Inspired heavily by the descriptive, crystalline prose of Jack Kerouac and Thomas Wolfe, it seeks to tell a story mainly through descriptions rather than characters. The piece delves into pessimism in its attempt to capture a portrait of the City of Chicago and, more broadly, of human society, exploring the faults and shortcomings of our world before ultimately making its case for optimism in our shared humanity.
At 8:10am on a Tuesday the doors of a two-car stainless steel train slide shut on the icy morning air of the Dempster station terminus of the Skokie Swift Yellow Line. Buckling slightly with a gentle hydraulic thud, the train stumbles south over the first rungs of many miles’ rail. A minute later it bumbles to a stop at the Oakton station — thud, doors open, passengers trickle on, close, thud — before continuing off once again by bridge over Skokie Boulevard and turning east along the Oakton Curve into the woods north of Howard. Straightening out and casting its sights lakeward, it accelerates, sparks flying rail-side, to a full-speed blast down the miles of rail leading to the Howard station hub, the gateway between the suburbs and the city. As the train brakes beside the platform, the doors open once more and the passengers file off to fill the platform, huddling beneath the ceiling heaters, perched in the icy air as the sparse traffic of the northernmost sprawl of the city proper drifts past a story beneath. Howard is a crossroads, a welding point of the city and the suburbs: snaking Red Line trains of a dozen cars or more strung together like beads on a string appear from the north, bound down the long-haul of North Side L, down into the subway tunnels that burrow stealthily beneath the Loop, and out again the whole way across the city’s southward-stretching length to 95th and Dan Ryan a horizon away. Others still appear from the south at the finale of the opposite voyage, grinding to a halt and emptying crew before running a quarter mile up-track and about-face to run the gauntlet again — on and on like clockwork they cycle, lungs swelling and emptying with the air of morning traffic bound on the day’s business. All the while dashed between, more little Yellow Lines trickle in every ten minutes; coming and going, open and close, on and off, back and forth they go from Dempster to Howard and back with the swift pride of Skokie beating at their sails, until finally, out of the wooded stretches of lakeside track that reach wispy like a tendril through the barren, branchy miles of Evanston arises a perfect Purple Line Express inbound from sleepy Linden Station in little Wilmette, breathless with the spirit of day and ready to face the morning. The passengers shuffle in, the doors close, and the train jolts off, no stops spared, on Chicago’s great express voyage.
Rocketing southward along the tracks, the cars sway into turns, shaking and shuddering over bumps. Sealed within the cars the passengers wobble along, each on their different ways into the city for uncounted different reasons. Students in DePaul and Columbia caps and scarves tap away frantically at precariously-balanced laptops, focus dashed between with drawn-out drags from seldom-washed coffee mugs in desperate, scrambling haste for word counts unmet, necks bent in penitence for the calamity of the night before’s disregard — living, suffering proof of lessons to be learned and the persevering vibrancy of youth that stumbles in their search. Sharp-shaven workmen in handsome topcoats and scarves line the exits like pale marble Davids reaching for youth’s height; draped in impeccable navy and trimmed in polished leather, they stand swinging from the aisle hand straps, proud leather briefcases at their feet, shouting to be known with adrenergic lust for the treasures of life won at the workplace, determined to carve their God-promised share of the world’s grand pie. Shaggy-shawled grandmothers of worn faces and tired eyes and skin folded by ages of rinse-and-repeat rising and setting sit in bent dignity with hands over laps, lost in the grooves of living a lifetime ingrained, hobbling along on their ways to god-knows-where, guided unfalteringly by deep wisdom of the tracks and the rhythms of life that flow along them. Across the car two strangers’ eyes catch; gazes held tight, they blush to be caught staring and freeze for a moment in hallowing silence, souls shaken by the vision of being known in this world: of skin on warm skin and of hearts trading beats, and the fractal fantasy that unfolds from between the glimmer of daze-caught eyes into branching odysseys of unspoken possibility that fizzle like fireworks across the dream-space of two human souls. Sparks flicker window-side as the train surges abrasively out of the rusted rail of a turn, and in that shimmering moment their gazes break apart, wrested away in the final strides of clarity by the realization of separate hearts and lives without, schismed away into the vacuum of world that fissures souls into silence. Daunted and dismayed, they lose gaze and return their thoughts in fluttering embarrassment to the web of buildings beyond the window, drifting back to their own lives apart.
This stop and that, next and next, Belmont and Fullerton — and didn’t you know that doors open on the right at Merchandise Mart? — stop and go, on and off they come in swarming hordes of scarves and shaggy jackets and tangles of headphones strewn throughout a sea of backpacks flying past along the widening artery straight into the city’s sky-reaching heart. The silhouette of steel in the south resurfaces over and again bolder each time from behind water towers and time-beaten signs of cracked lead paint plastered lifetimes ago on the weathered brown fruit of forgotten bricklayers’ labor. Higher and broader it rises like the shoulders of a mountain climbing in incremental wonder above the tree line to swallow the sky. Tall panes of glass zip past trackside, and between them in the distance a crane peers out over the girdered skeleton of a building-to-be. The ground wraps away under the mechanical foliage of concrete, cast iron, and steel to a jagged epicenter of peaks, pinnacled at its summit only footsteps before the southern sun. A distant window glistens with sunlight, and, just as suddenly, the trackside buildings vanish, the bustling streets fall away, and the web of steel parts to reveal a river full hundreds of feet across trudging along beneath — the river, the princely Chicago River that flows through the Crown City, granting passage between the Great Lakes of the North and the Great River beyond that divides the continent and collects its watershed from a million trifling streams into a single gargantuan host feeding ceaselessly out into the world-circling seas two thousand miles away. In the east, toward the lake, the climbing sun bristles through the backlit golden clouds and sheds its light in a glancing fury of beams upon the river and the walls and windows of all the buildings that line it north, south, and west, and for the wonderful space of just ten seconds the passengers’ faces are caught under the silent spotlight of rays that converge from all sides on this one small spot — this one little train making passage across the river — as if the whole city had turned their heads and, in a chorus of gazes in perfect unison laid, smiled upon them a radiant million-fold welcome. Then, just like that, as soon as it came it is gone once more; the shelf of buildings engulfs the open world once again, the train slips back into the ravine-web of streets beneath the buildings’ shadows, and that is when you are finally in, deep in the final thick of it: you are in The Loop — doors open on the right at Clark and Lake.
The passengers step off the train and hear it jerk away behind them, flashing off like lightning in a roaring flush of wind and sparks, gone as soon as it arrived. In mad flurry they bustle about the platform and collect together like a floodwaters by the two exits that drain the platform east and west, grating their way through meshed revolving doors and shuffling step-by-hurried-step down the salt-peppered wrought iron stairs. Down they pour onto the streets below like waterfall spatter in wave-after-wave into the thicket fury of the city’s morning rush. Figures tall and short of all sizes and shapes whisk past on every side, bundled thick against the biting-cold swirls of pre-winter air that whistle through the narrow canyon-streets in the titan shadows of skyscrapers, dashing this way and that, jostling for spots and eking out with mechanical precision into the narrow streets only inches from cars: a furious rush driven by wild impatience to get here and there, fill every corner of space, turn every breath of cold air warm — branching away like a million space-filling capillaries bearing the warmth of life to their own little crevice, everybody and the wind like arrow-shot, somewhere-bound.
Deep within the towers that rise above the streets, metal boxes hurl back and forth on an endless frantic chase from floor to floor. Whistling and whining on tracks that sway before them, they shuffle up and back down again, scarves and ties and workbags within bound for their seats in the sky. The doors open and the people exit, filing through lobbies and path-wise like blossoming branchwork into all the rooms of every building, taking seats by the windows with the city framed spectacularly behind. In the open air beyond the glass rise colossal structures layered near-to-far stretching away in cascading search for horizons unobscured. Smokestacks fill the sky with bold processions of steam, and broad glass panes set in gallant steel glisten in the glancing sunlight of late-November noon. In the western distance, a stream of cars trawls endlessly between the northern and southern skies, borne breathlessly upon the wind along the Highways of Eisenhower that bear like Atlas the unending burden of the traffic of a Continent of the Earth. The wind whistles through the gulley of an overpass, and somewhere in the distance a flag wavers, red white and blue flickering against the silver silhouette of a rainless cloud. A red streetlight changes green, and the echoes of impatient honks resound across the city as cars everywhere burst forward on missions that dare not be stayed, all of them moving to the same tides that push the passengers from platform to street, filled with the gargantuan breath of life and the million-fold master-pulse beating to the city’s rhythm that forces itself through all the doors, every stairs and every hallway down-low and up-high, the Red and Blue Line tunnels, the trash-ridden alleyways, and even the endless miles of sewer that channel the colossal wastes of ten million days — all the places big and small, no stones unturned.
In the waning floors of a tower of steel from behind double-doors the courthouse sends forth in endless paper streams the city’s justice: the good and the bad, the right and the wrong. So speaks the judge to the gavel’s beat unto the people down below: the people who on the streets bustle, the cars that growl, the bicycles that come and go like wind-bound gulls all day and night as agents of the city’s living will passing breath along the tracks. Higher still in a skyward spire where the buzzing shouts of the streets below dim only to echoes, gold watches dangle beneath bespoke suit sleeves, hands extended, and with firm clasps like cloudless thunder issue forth convulsions that shake the land around to the dollar’s will — so spake the sky-dwellers unto the subjects down below — and the exchanges and malls, the hotels and shops, the stations and airports, every last gas pump and every little cocoa stand and even the grime that piles the alleyway crevices tick and tock, sway and rock, and all is moving together as one.
In the steel and stonework of the buildings’ walls and faces is written a chronicle for those that can read it: of the progression through time of the city’s furious will, how it unfolded and exploded through the centuries under the burning heat of its inhabitants’ breath renewed through generations. So it was that the marshes were drained and the streets paved, that rock was carved and steel was girdered and driven upward through the age of industry into a continental massif shearing the clouds. So the city grew up and out and filled the sky with stone and steel, until the fateful day when the war was won and their woes abated, when steel sprouted forth alone and unencumbered into the era of space-dreaming sleekness. Shedding their stone raiment and donning elegant glass, the buildings spread forth across the clouds to catch the skyward future’s light, showering it down onto the city streets below — an age of changing and growing and of bright ideas and tearful hope, when the future was ripe for claiming, when even the Moon drew within fables’ reach, and the prize of the Sun would be caught and a piece handed to every Child of God who walked beneath heaven’s gaze from then unto the end of time.
In the older structures can still be seen the craft of builders of old who made their bids for the clouds in the days before sky-sleek glass, back in the dawning years of industrial awe when steel first poured in raging rivers out of eastern mills into the heart of stone. The gallant facades of marble and granite stand to this day like sky-borne essays — pride of the city’s wonder —collecting the elements. They glisten still in the light of the passing sun, though a century of smoke and smog and the fouler flavors of a city’s breath has taken its toll of wearing and weathering. The once-glimmering marble cuts are dulled and cloaked in graying shades of tan in weary progression to final black. Suns rise and set and wheel away again under the turning earth as the land locks into a slow, unceasing rot, and decay weeps in drops through every crack, sinking back and forth through taps and drains and dissolving ceaselessly all around, diffuse in the air and precipitating in every corner all the time as a ruinous tincture wrecking slow death on the veins and flesh of a living man; for these are the structures of men, and the same their fate.
From this vantage point the fate of the web of steel and stone and wonderful plastics and fabulous alchemies — the ghastly end of the line fast-approach — is too painfully clear. Sooted in the shadowy cracks of stone hides the subtle visage of a skeleton, whose grimace smites the cold granite and glares painfully upon the windows and polished steel, biding time in silence as the buildings beat against the elements in the stoic test of years. The world wheels in indifference as clouds pass and moons disappear behind them, and suns melt away into countless obscurity toward the final horizon of the last silent century and the drawing of the last breath. Steel moans and stone cracks, and with a splintering rattle the buildings and all their stories collapse in helpless humility to the ground — for nothing that is known escapes unknowing. This is the story of those who stand on this earth against the winds, who rise from the ground in centuries’ procession and make their bids for the stars at the soaring break of noon, reaching ever for works beyond wonder and horizons beyond knowing; but all the while their breath expires, and their blood, precipitating with the venoms of time, slows finally to a viscous weariness as they come, eyes drooping, to a grinding halt. Spent of their vision and emptied of the reaching will, they yawn in moot protest, draw shut their tired eyes, and surrender inexorably to the final sleepy haze as the engorged weight of centuries’ excess crashes down in cataclysm upon the crumbling towers of withered rust they drew beneath so long ago.
All the while the sun inches farther into the west, its glancing light sinking through a succession of angles into shades of yellow and reddening orange, flaring the city’s western face in gold and casting its shadow toward infinity on the lake behind before itself dissipating into the quiet of violet night. The day’s labors finished, the workers yawn, their eyelids grown heavy. Workbooks and laptops close, shops’ blinders draw, neon “OPEN” flickers “CLOSED,” a hundred thousand coat racks empty of a million different coats, and on every floor of every building backs turn in tired indifference on rooms siphoned of fluorescence. The elevators rush back and forth again along their tracks as the buildings empty to swell the streets below in a second frantic rush, and the workers trickle in perfect order back the way they came, up to the platforms and into the trains that arrive and disappear like clockwork on their ways to everywhere. From the small outlook window of a rear car, the tracks converge and the city falls away behind the caboose of one of many Purple Line Expresses; the sun has shrank under the earth now, and as office lights switch off, the great buildings pixelate into darkness: cold stone against the blackness of night. The city recedes until the mass of steel and rock has shrank irretrievably behind a stretching sprawl of red and brown brick chimneys unfolding to nowhere in three directions, framed only against the dark silhouettes of office buildings that disappear anyway into lightless, fleeting irrelevance.
Sedgwick, Armitage, Fullerton, Diversey — the cars drum north block-after-block in robotic procession all the way to Wilson, where the doors close finally on the city outside and the train drags off on a rocketing seven-mile haul through the remaining length of North Side rail that whisks past like the stuff of dreams, peeling up finally to the heels of the suburbs at old Howard Station. The doors open to a flood of cold air rushing in over the sound of heaters buzzing overtime in vain effort to keep it out. Tired fluorescence hums about the platform, exposing plainly its blemishes: the rusted metal and rotting wooden boards, decay kept barely at bay by the ceaseless patching over of things but seeping out always nonetheless. Total vanity it seems when measured against the inevitability of its doom, when a thousand cycles of breaking and cracking and fixing and patching have all passed and are all forgotten, until one day there is no more: no more heaters to warm the cars, no more tracks to carry them or passengers to fill them. No more rust to paint over, no more boards to patch; no more gavels or handshakes or dollars, nor driving will or beating heart to summon and say “be,” only a waveless lake draped in shadow feeding a tired funeral procession, as rain dissolves the tracks and carries their ruin to sea.
What would the children of the future think who followed the trail of spectral, faded memory, passing among rust-bitten plaques and withered statue stands and empty mentions of forgotten places into the sinking chasms of sunrises past? What would they dream of, those who would hear the myths of the Great City of the Lakes and Plains, envisioning wistfully the shining glory of a century of suns sparkling down upon inexhaustible river flow, and a thunderous wall crowning above the plains to announce its presence and project its shadow into the world’s far reaches? Science and industry, music and history, light and beauty: the wonderful backset against which they would measure their bleak world and its growing silhouette of titanic darkness. What a shame, when they would uncover the charade and come to taste the world’s poison and in horror discover the lurking shroud inching always over eyes and sight, in their time as in ours.
The shades of passengers’ shadows whisk along the platform boards under the pale fluorescence as trains come and go, until in weariness from the north arises another Yellow Line train from Skokie. On they file and off the train jerks, as the heaters hum once more to replace the warmth wrenched away by the cold world beyond the walls. Mangled branches and electric lines whisk past in the darkness outside as the train retraces its morning steps and sprints robotically again into the dark of the suburbs. Oakton comes and is gone, and Dempster is next — the end of the line. Cars bustle past in the streets behind, and a bus’s radiator is heard thrumming in the vague distance. The train lurches to a stop and releases a soft hydraulic sigh before letting open its doors.
Into the gentle lull of the platform air a small sneaker steps out, above it a girl dressed in jeans and a warm brown coat, scarved and buttoned most of the way up but hiding beneath hints of a red patterned sweater. At her side is a suitcase, clicking and clopping as its wheels roll over the gap between train and platform. Behind her follows a man in a topcoat, suitcase at his side as well, and then a woman with a young boy, and then many more. Suitcases, suitcases — clopping along the platform, click-clack over cracks, shuffling about alongside footsteps and scarves.
Suitcases everywhere, because Thursday is Thanksgiving, and on its eve across America porch lights flicker as doors open to happy smiles, and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters pass from bitter cold into homely warmth, take off their boots, and share warmth, hearts bleeding fire-side, melding together with the radiance of ten million hearths as a streak of light across the earth. All the suburbs that line the horizon pressed against the dark northern sky, and the patchwork of country towns and open field that stretch behind them, and every tiny house across the plains glimmer with a million speckled points of the same glowing light: a gentle light that wraps like a warm blanket across the Plains and the River and over the Mountains and the Earth’s bulge to the Sea beyond, that pours its warmth into space and shields the land on its passage through the next of numberless nights. This is the light of a nation of souls shining forth in defiance of lethargy and death, the light that drives in youth and binds in old age and passes as a torch imperishable through the hands of men, stark and brilliant against a black infinity of cold matter and empty time. The light that lines the platforms and pushes the trains, drives the elevators and shakes the buildings, that beats the blood that turns air to breath; the light they bear in silence in the train car and that lines and folds their faces from birth to death, that catches the gaze of lovers and holds them in embrace across the empty dark through generations immemorial; the light they bore through time that traces its path through a billion years’ march from sea to sky and bends its knee to the mountaintop sun, burning away high and beautiful beyond the skeleton’s reach with the promise of sunrise a trillion times to come and a place for us before it.
At 8:10 am the next day a train will leave Dempster Station heading south. One train among many, it will pass as always along the web of tracks bearing the people to their places in the sky. There they will sit and in the wheeling sun bask as the day passes overhead, heeding nothing of clouds or of sunset or the dark that approaches at their doorsteps; tomorrow will be Thanksgiving, and the skeleton will be at bay — for that is not his day.
© 2020 Ilyas Taraki
notes from my iPhone 